What do Yoruba costumes, Cindy Sherman, and giant sculptural sunglasses have in common? They’re all part of a new installation put together by fashion designer Duro Olowu (he doesn’t use the term curated). It all started with his mother.
Category Archives: Installation art
Photo Collage: Miguel Rio Branco
Miguel Rio Branco installation (Photo: Pedro Motta)
It’s been called another Versailles. Or the Disneyland of the future. It’s Inhotim——-a huge art complex and botanical park in southeastern Brazil. Privately owned, it’s got international art star installations and 12,000 varieties of palm trees. Miguel Rio Branco has his own pavilion there.
Rio Branco is a Brazilian photographer whose work, though stunning, is usually too seamy for me. Among his favorite subjects are prostitutes —————not exactly Disney. He describes the essence of his work this way: “… being in paradise, yet having something absolutely terrible taking place.”
Installation Collage: CandyCoated
Children’s costume,
“Martha Washington,”
Early 20th c.,
Say you’re planning a show of antique children’s costumes. You know, Little Red Riding Hood. Martha Washington. A Maltese water carrier. But you want to jazz it up a little———–after all, this is 2013. Who you gonna call?
Banksy & Matisse: Nothing but Masterpieces
I think of Banksy as the Zorro of the art world. Masked? Nobody knows his real identity–reportedly, not even his parents, who think he’s a high-end decorator.
After dark, he might turn up anywhere. He dazzles with his swordplay–okay, make that spray paint play. Then he vanishes into the night.
His art leans heavily on stencilled figures and silhouettes, gritty content, in-your-face messages. EVen if some of it later is sold for six figures. Still, this is illegal street art.
The Forgotten Women of Collage: Lil Picard (Pt. 2)
Lil Picard, “Burnt Ties” 1968
Machismo in reverse. In the early ’60’s, Lil Picard had been using women’s cosmetics as primary materials in her collages and assemblages. In 1968, she exhibited the burnt neckties at a show called “Destruction in Art.”
Critic Lucy Lippard wrote, ” “In 1967, using (perhaps not coincidentally) her husband’s real silk neckties, Picard began to burn things.” The ties were shown a few years later at Lajeski Gallery in New York with an added performance element: Picard used matches and irons to singe gallery-goers’ neckties.
The Forgotten Women of Collage: Lil Picard Pt. 1
Lil Picard, “Vin Ordinaries Chatel du Roy,” 1957 (Collage and oil on canvas)
A cabaret performer in Berlin before World War II. An artist in New York scavenging the streets for collage materials in the 1940’s. A journalist covering the art scene in New York in the fifties. A pioneering performance artist in early ’60’s “happenings” (think Cafe a Go Go). An habitue of Warhol’s factory who appeared in his films and wrote for Interview.
You’d think someone with this resume would be famous. But you’ve probably never heard of Lil Picard. I know I hadn’t.
Collage Materials: Jim Hodges
Jim Hodges, “Every Touch,” (detail) 1995
Jim Hodges does a lot with flowers. Also mirrors, granite, scarves, and, oh yeah, paper. The results are magical and exhilarating. Also fragile and sorrowful. In many of his works, a collage aesthetic is at play.
Jim Hodges, Untitled, 2000. Acrylic on newspaper, 56 x 68.6 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Artlicks via Another Mag.
Paper was the first material that fascinated him. He talked about it during his 2009 exhibition Love, Etc. at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in an interview with Christophe Ecoffet. Hodges liked “the flexibility of paper, how paper can tear, and be unfolded and folded.” In one work, he collaged hearts cut from painted newspaper.
Your brain…your brain on collage
Collage can be a metaphor for consciousness. After all, the mind is like a collage. Ephemera, glued together by an invisible Artist. The result in patterns may or might not make sense.
Some minds might be like a collage by the painter Elliott Puckette.
Elliott Puckette, “Untitled,” 2005 (Courtesy the Artist & Paul Kasmin Gallery)
Others might be like a work by Raven Schlossberg:
Raven Schlossberg, “Belvedere Arms,” 2002 (Private collection, New York
g-module, Paris )
Still others might resemble the minds of Thomas Hirschhorn and Felipe Oliveira Baptista: you never know what they’ll look like.
Tartan, Pablo Neruda, Comme des Garcons
Still from Nick Relph’s “Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field” 2010
I like putting things together that you wouldn’t normally connect. Once I Googled on “Pablo Neruda” and “Allen Iverson.” Who else might connect the late Chilean poet and the hip-hop NBA star? I got some weird links, but clicked on one which turned out to be a blog partly in English and mostly in another language. Which I couldn’t even identify. The only thing that came to my mind was: Tagalog? I wasn’t even sure what that was.
Turned out to be right! Tagalog is a primary language of the Phillipines, and I verified from towns mentioned in a blog post about shopping that the blogger was a twenty-something woman in the Phillipines who shared my fondness for both these guys with poetic crossover moves and a tendency to stir controversy.
A British artist living in New York, Nick Relph likes to come up with surprising combinations.
Crazy & Wackers
Isa Genzken “Bouquet” 2004
plastic, wood, lacquer, mirror foil, glass
“A kind of artistic bag lady.” That’s how one French critic described sculptor Isa Genzken. Her “bricollage of materials and manners, idioms and styles creates a willful and bewildering confusion.”
An English critic went further. He saw the artist’s work in the context of what he calls “the one insurmountable fact” about her, “that Genzken suffers from prolonged periods of mental ill-health.”
Isa Genzken, “Abendmahl (Last Supper),” 2008
Aluminum plate, mirror foil, spray-paint, tape, color print on paper
What? An artist making work whose meaning you can’t “always grasp”? She must be nuts! Whatever Genzken’s difficulties, the “ungraspable” quality of an artwork hardly qualifies as a reason to get out the butterfly nets.
Collage Volupté 